Let’s be real, people. We need to start using the word trashlation to describe what too often passes for professional activity in the language services sector these days.


An exploration of language technologies, translation education, practice and politics, ethical market strategies, workflow optimization, resource reviews, controversies,
coffee and other topics of possible interest to the language service community and those it serves.
Let’s be real, people. We need to start using the word trashlation to describe what too often passes for professional activity in the language services sector these days.
The series of three workshops on the use of regex resources in memoQ, with a particular emphasis on the integrated Regex Assistant library, has been updated and will be offered again on March 9, 16 and 23 from 3:00 pm to 4:30 Lisbon time (4:00 pm to 5:30 pm CET, 10:00 am-11:30 am EST).
You can register here to attend any or all of the three sessions:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEpde-sqTkvGtCdMsrBl825tFrpDQ98FkAI
This is an evolving course, with the content continuously adapted in response to new questions, workflow challenges and process research as well as interoperability studies with other tools. Participants in the last series asked quite a number of interesting things during and after the talks, and their questions provided excellent material for new examples and approaches, and I hope for the same experience in this round.
The memoQ Regex Assistant is a unique library tool introduced in its current form in memoQ version 9.9. The little bit of public discussion there has been about this tool is quite misleading. Contrary to the "pitch" from memoQ employees and nerdy fans in the user base, this isn't really a tool for learning regular expressions. There are much better means for doing that. And I have strong personal objections to the idiotic statements I hear so often that "everyone should learn some regex". What utter nonsense.
What everyone should do is take advantage of the power regular expressions offer to simplify time-consuming tasks of translation, review, quality assurance and more to ensure accuracy and consistency in language resources and translations. The Regex Assistant helps with this by providing a platform where useful "expressions" can be collected and organized with readable names, labels and descriptions in any language. These libraries can be sorted, exchange with other users and applied for filtering, find and replace operations, QA checks, segmentation improvements, structured translation of dates, currency expressions, bibliographic information, legal citations and more or exported and converted to formats for easy use in other tools such as Trados Studio, Phrase/Memsource, Transtools+ and more. All without the need to learn any regular expression syntax!
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An exported Regex Assistant library converted to a readable format by XSLT |
My objective is not to teach regex syntax. It is to empower users to take more control of their work environment and save time and frustration for their teams and enjoy more life beyond the wordface. To help with that, I provide some usable examples in a follow-up mail after each sessions: resources that you can use in your own work and share freely with colleagues.
And in this next round of workshops, available for purchase, there will be some additional high value resources to help achieve better outcomes for work in particular language pairs and particular specialties, such as financial translations. These complex resources were developed over a period of years, sometimes at great cost. In the last session I'll be getting "down and dirty and a little nerdy" to show you my way of maintaining complex resources like these auto-translation rules and others in a very effective, sustainable way that enables you to adapt quickly to changing requirements and style guides.
Sign up free to join the fun here.Note: there will be another series of workshops for this subject matter in March. Details are HERE. Register once to attend any or all of the sessions.
Users of memoQ version 9.9 or later have a powerful library tool available with which they can organize solutions or solution elements that use regular expressions and apply these without the complications of learning regex syntax. In each session, we'll look at different ways in which these portable libraries can be used, with a particular emphasis on solving common problems faced by translators and reviewers. Materials will also be made available to participants for later study and practice.
There will be three sessions of 90 minutes each on three consecutive Thursdays: January 19, January 26 and February 2 at 11:00 a.m. Lisbon time (i.e. noon CET). The first session will introduce the Regex Assistant library and its basic functions for organizing and exchanging information and then move on to specific examples of using the library to deal with common problems encountered in translation and review work. Particular emphasis in the first session will be on filtering and Find/Replace operations.
The two later sessions will continue to explore filtering and options for making changes to texts and tags, and we will also take a tour of possibilities for using regular expression resources (from the library!) in other parts of memoQ such as the Regex Tagger, QA checks or auto-translation rules. As time permits, examples or requests from participants can also be explored.
Those interested in joining the free sessions can register here.
Update: a recording of the first session is available here: https://youtu.be/KKR5aH5oGH8
To get a little taste of what's to come, have a look at this video created by a colleague last year: